How Yankees and Red Sox Fans Really Feel About the AL Wild Card Series

It’s happening again. Sports-induced psychosis is nigh. People are back to screaming at toddlers for wearing a different hat than them. While it’s not technically October yet, the truest spirit of the MLB postseason is set to arrive a day early. Starting on Tuesday night, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will once again face off in the playoffs.

For the dedicated fans—we’re talking the ones with team logo tattoos, children named after Derek Jeter or David Ortiz, and freshly-drained savings accounts from splurging on tickets—this means war. For those of us with no dog in the fight, it’s the platonic ideal of a postseason matchup. A death match between two of the oldest teams in the game, constantly at each other’s throats like ancient feuding families, is the type of thing to make any sports fan plop down on the couch and emit their loudest hell yeah.

But for the fans—oh, the fans. You know them. You see them around town, no matter where you live. Maybe you’re one of them yourself. For that crowd, this series represents something far beyond baseball. The Yankee contingent will have you believe that Boston is a fifth-tier city that doesn’t even deserve to share a coast with New York City, thus making the Red Sox an inferior organization. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s latest film, Highest 2 Lowest, you’re familiar with the director’s distaste for Beantown, which is anything but subtle. I Slacked one of my coworkers, a born-and-bred New Yorker, for his thoughts on the Red Sox; he replied with an all-caps “FUCK ‘EM” before I could even finish typing. Another colleague, a Long Islander, chimed in with, “The mental image of [Red Sox outfielder] Jarren Duran putting the Wally head on in the dugout after a home run genuinely raises my blood pressure, and I will be losing sleep over this upcoming series.”

Boston backers, meanwhile, will paint this as a battle of good versus evil: their boys symbolizing salt-of-the-earth righteousness; the Yankees constituting a cross between Darth Vader and the literal antichrist. Ben Affleck, Massachusetts’ favorite son, once famously halted production of Gone Girl because he refused to let the NY logo anywhere near him. When I asked Josh Gondelman, our esteemed Boston sports correspondent, to sum up the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, he put it like this: “I moved from Boston (okay, Somerville) to New York City more than 14 years ago, but the ugliest parts of my personality come out when I think of the Yankees. I want them to lose in new and innovative ways. I want their fans, including children, to have a bad time watching.”

There’s nothing wrong with blind sports loathing, exactly, as long as you’re a respectable adult about it. (In other words: no over-the-line personal attacks, no doxxing, no violence, etc.) Sports are more fun when there are real stakes, but also when the fans of one team want the opposing city to be completely sawed off the map, Bugs Bunny-style. It’s part of what makes European soccer so appealing to American audiences: the fanbases that take their sports allegiances so seriously, they’d willingly excommunicate family members over a team-related dispute. Yanks-Sox is the closest thing we have to the Manchester derby, right down to the funny accents, and it always makes for excellent cinema. As my Long Island desk mate said of his baseball opps, “The Red Sox have always been the perfect foil to the Yankees; blue vs. red, Jeter’s clean shave vs. Johnny Damon’s beard, multiple dynasties vs. an 86-year drought.”